


Coping Mechanisms

by MessedUpMessages



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: deep philosophical angst, mostly character introspection stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 13:08:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16159580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MessedUpMessages/pseuds/MessedUpMessages
Summary: Pidge has some hurts that need healing. and she's not the only one. shes just the lucky one.





	Coping Mechanisms

**Author's Note:**

> this is basically a ten minute drabble i did in class the other day. its all about how being a human in space sucks. so yeah. have fun.
> 
> o yea, my other fic the riptide one? im gonna repost it as a oneshot once im done. srry for typos again. i swear im an intellectual.

Pidge had seen more of the universe than most fifteen year olds could dare to dream of. She was the pilot of the left arm of a 10,000 year old giant metal robot, fighting a 10,000 year old tyrant in a war that was not her own, and not for her own lands. She had seen the expanse of the universe and kept her sanity despite it, and she confidently crawled up to defeat and stolen victory time and time again. She faced the teeth of death and other horrors daily and survived, running on borrowed time that she never should have been granted.

She was lucky, she realized that now. Back on earth she had thought that some higher power was doubly cursing her, taking away her father and brother, then her mother's sanity. But then, now she realized it was an unusual blessing wrapped in a cloak of hardship and sorrow. She searched and she found. She found her brother and her father, alive, whole. One was sent back to safety, the other she kept by her side, fighting with her. She knew she was lucky.

The others weren't so much.

She had seen lance crying when he thought no one could see, trying to hold on to the fading memories of his family. They were only alive in his mind to him, not being able to know what had happened in his absence. 

She watched hunk fill the kitchen with food, trying to force his mind away from the losses by stuffing it with numbers and fractions and formulas, burying greif to be found years later when needed. But who ever needed greif.

She had been the same way, hiding her fractured with glue of science and smarts, trying to hold onto the finite definitions of things, the absolutes, the solids. She still needed it to hide her agony over matt being in the front lines, flying in flimsy ships rather than indestructible metal. She still knew how that maddening echoing empty vastness of space taunted you, flaunting it's possibilities, saying ‘look what i have. I hold your loved ones in the palm of my fist, and i shall never give them up. Never. You may never have them.’ it made you feel tiny. Insignificant. A speck of dust throwing itself at the foot of a giant.

Allura and coran both drowned their sorrow in overexhuberent, unending cheerfulness, a cleverly built, ironclad facade. It was their only coping mechanism against the face of the overwhelming grief of losing your entire family, society, people, and home.

She had seen keith fight till he dropped, trying to outrun something in his past, something in his thoughts. For the life of her she couldn't find out what. She regularly monitored shiro on his nighttime, prowling patrols of the castle, hounded by the ghosts of his past and imprisonment. None of them, not even keith,  _ really _ knew shiro. Not really.

But there's something about being forced into a bond with the only five other humans in space that brings you together despite any old, festering wounds. It brought to the forefront the knowledge that in order to grow, you first must heal.

Keith had such a wound. 

They all did, pidge had seen them all, but his was the worst. His was abandonment and inadequacy. He had grown up being told he wasn't good enough, and from what he had told them, basically parentless. So when he showed up a few weeks later with his galra mother in tow and a caseload of hurt to offload on someone, something, she knew someone should try to talk to him. No one volunteered, and so pidge found herself in the hall outside his door. She opened it, expecting to find him sitting on his bed, staring at his knife.

She was not prepared for him to be curled on the floor, knees drawn into his chest as tears ran down his face. She was not prepared for lance to be kneeled next to him, arms wrapping him in comfort, rocking him back and forth. She was not prepared for the hushed words that fell from lances lips, and the expression on keith’s face as he lapped them up heartbrokenly like a lifesaving drug.

Suddenly lance looked up and say pidge, but he didn't say anything. He shook his head imperceptibly, a look of immeasurable sadness and something lost in his eyes. So pidge left. 

If wounds could heal, she hoped this one did. 


End file.
